The MLA citation website pertains to any source that has been accessed and retrieved online that has been formatted according to the rules, guidelines and stylistic conventions established by the Modern Language Association, or MLA. An MLA citation website is used particularly for citing electronic or online references, including websites, web pages, online databases, and other similar electronic or virtual sources in a works cited page.

Normally, these electronic or online sources are considered as “web publications” by the MLA, thus, in your MLA citation website entry, you are sometimes required to identify the medium as “web.” When possible, it is a good idea to maintain personal copies of electronic information, such as the complete URLs of the web pages where you took your sources. It is good practice to print or save web pages or, instead, using a program such as Adobe Acrobat, to keep your own copies for future reference, or in case your instructor requires print copies. Today, most web browsers will include URL or electronic address information when you print, which makes for later reference easy. Also, you have the option to use the bookmark function in your web browser in order to return to documents more easily.

Below is the commonly used MLA citation website format for electronic and online sources:

Author’s Last name, First Name, Middle Initial. “Article Title.” Title of Reference Work. Year Published. Day Mo. Year {Date Retrieved from Web}. <URL>

As shown in the format example, an MLA citation website includes the author’s complete name. For works that do not have attributed authors, you need to begin your citation entry by using the article title and enclose it within quotation marks.

If you are referring to specific pages, but your source lacks numbering, it’s acceptable to leave out the page numbers from your parenthetical or in-text citations. Additionally, you do not to use page numbers that are generated on a printout of a web document. However, you may use them if you are using PDF documents that have page numbers as your source.

Should you require further assistance in formatting your MLA citation website sources and preparing your works cited page, you are advised to use a citation generator, an online utility that is specially designed to automatically generate your citations in the proper MLA format. Remember to list all of your citation entries alphabetically by the author’s last names in your works cited page, and to separate the citation entries with periods. For works that do not have authors, you need to list them by their titles.